NanoClusters and InkJet Printing - The Print Process is Not Used to Print But to Manufacture

11/2008

The key to a "bottom-up" production of possibly the first heterometallic gallium-indium hydroxide nanocluster was the substitution of nitroso-butylamine as an additive in place of nitrosobenzene.

The above sentence is not made up - it is part of an article here.

But the reason I have been following NanoTechnology as it interrelates to printing - is simple.

One day most IC boards, video displays, light sources, and electrical devices will be as thin as a piece of paper and will have the ability to be manufactured on demand - with the help of Nanoclusters, thin-film, and Inkjet applications. See "State-of-the-art inks and other materials are opening up new applications for inkjet as a manufacturing tool."

Stop for a second and think - ink is applied onto a surface, if we replace the ink with a substance that could say, conduct electrical current, and we could control the current within the structures "printed" on a surface in an elemental sense we would be able to "print" fully functional, custom, IC boards.

We could print/spray/inkjet, on the surface of a sheet of paper, shingle, or car roof, a solar collector(Konarka demonstrates micro/nano inkjet-printed solar cells). And with wireless power, transfer the captured power to other, flat, "printed" lighting sources - a "light bulb" as thin as a sheet of paper.

Oh but wait, there is so much more.

The computer of the future could be 'painted' into your desk surface, or briefcase, or the lap of your trousers. ( see Inkjet printers could be the chip factories of the future, squirting out circuits made from layers of organic semiconducting ink.)

HUH?

HD video displays "spray-painted" onto walls - this would add a dimension to "tagging".

Cell Phones, applied to clothing, tattoos that light up at night, cars that change colors - or show running video all over its surface...

Well, before all this BladeRunner stuff hits, I guess we can look forward to nanotechnologies assisting in regular, boring, photo-prints:

"Photo-quality papers with ink-receptive mesoporous layers that are based on inorganic solids fulfill the requirements of present-day high-speed inkjet printer much better than those based on organic polymers..."

Experiments indicate that the presence of nanosized polynuclear aluminum complexes in the ink-receptive layers of new paper can help to improve the permanence of photo-quality images. This means colors stay longer on paper containing nanosized polynuclear aluminum complexes.

I still want one day to be able to change the color of my Rover as easily as I change the color scheme on my Windows...

Interesting? See:

Nano Packs

Click to email me.

How Your I.T. Contacts Look at Print Volume

11/2008

This IT professional illustrates the internal challenges those on the outside never see or appreciate. This is a long post, but get through it, it's worth the read.

Also, kudos to rIKON: The "IT's Fault" Perception and Karma - Written by Jay Rollins, Off the TechRepublic site, here. 

"So this week on the new job was interesting. As with many organizations, IT’s arch-nemesis, marketing, was having issues. They were trying to print these ginormous files on a teeny-tiny color printer and could not understand why they kept getting errors. Every time they would try to print to this printer the expected “belch…puke…putter” sound was heard and out would come a screwed-up rendition of what they were trying to print. And only one out of the 600 copies they requested. 

The challenge in this day and age is that everyone and their grandmother expect to be able to click “print” on a file and it just magically happens. And because 99.999% of printing is just that, “magic,” it becomes increasingly painful to listen to marketing complain to the CEO that they can’t do something as easy as printing a file. 

Now we all know that the phrase “it depends” comes into play here. My astute colleague at my new job reminded me that any PC has the potential to blow up any printer given the right opportunity. So how do you react? They just attacked you in front of the CEO waving the “incompetent” banner! You can’t come back and say that you can’t print a 10GB PDF to a home office printer and not expect a buffer overflow. That just sounds lame and you can see everyone’s eyes glazing over before you utter the words. Besides, we’re IT. We don’t look for quippy comebacks because we’re solution-oriented. We’re all about customer service. Right? 

Here comes Karma. I’m all about the root cause. 

We don’t have any desktop publishing expertise on staff, but one of our enterprising senior guys called up a graphic artist buddy of his to get some pointers. But before that happened, one of our other key guys already started looking at outsourcing solutions. Finding the experts in the field and making it their problem was a brilliant stroke of genius. We looked at the volume of printing that marketing was doing and called up our IKON partner. 

They came to the table with a proposal that was about even with what marketing was spending on their newsletters and calendars. But I followed my own advice and reviewed the entire accounts payable for the company. I discovered a ton of other printing the company was doing outside of marketing that actually made the IKON solution stand out. There were challenges. I was trying to keep marketing from chucking the problem over the wall to IT. I sent them the section of my spreadsheet of every vendor that I thought was a printing vendor. For anything that contained or referenced the words “print,” “promotion,” “publisher” or “press,” I asked them to identify vendors. In order to make this proposal work, we needed to establish rules and controls to fully realize the benefits of the IKON solution. 

All printing had to go through the centralized print shop. Accounting needed to be made aware that printing at Kinko’s could no longer be expensed. If the teams could not plan a week ahead to schedule their printing, then the old adage of “Your lack of planning does not mean my crisis” comes into play and there are no excuses. Additionally, one of the top five issues in the helpdesk gets outsourced. We were both stakeholders. But marketing continued to push back. I came to realize that this IT organization was all about customer service. 

They did everything for the business units even to their own detriment. I came from the school where you try to get the business unit to have some skin in the game, but we had our own customer service scores to attend to. So I found myself on the horns of a dilemma. I needed to make the changes in the organization to start making the business units more accountable for their projects, but at the same time, ensure our internal customer service scores did not suffer. 

After all, this was no small sum of money we were talking about.

"Then I started thinking about it. Sure, Marketing is the big customer for this, but we have the opportunity to save $300k per year if we include some of the other printing into this project. It calls for cross-functional coordination and involvement."

This isn’t a marketing project. It’s an IT project. 

Marketing had the opportunity to pick up a huge win for the company, not just for marketing, but they kept pushing it back on IT. But IT can see the true value of the project because we’re not looking within a silo. We are looking at this from an enterprise architecture standpoint. We’re all about killing multiple birds with one stone. Marketing got their dig in at the beginning of the issue, but IT turned that lump of coal into a diamond. 

Short-term claims of incompetence don’t ring true in the eyes of management anymore. We rose from the ashes of adversity! We overcame the obstacles! We….are getting cornier as I continue, but you get the point. Score: Marketing 0, IT 1. So I have had my fun here. This is an illustrative example only. IT will never succeed if there is a scoreboard. The “us versus them” thing is so counter to “team” it isn’t funny. When the time comes, I am not presenting this as an IT victory. 

I am presenting it as a marketing victory. Why? Because I need marketing on my side for long-term success. Marketing drives the business. They generate sales and revenue. I need to make them look good in the eyes of management. These little successes will give marketing the courage to try new things and start thinking outside of the marketing silo. They start looking at the company in its entirety and truly start believing that their job makes a difference. They start believing that and great things start to happen. Sales increase, productivity increases, salaries increase, and bonuses increase. 

 Karma.

 -----------------End Post "

I know this is a long post, but this is a typical situation. 

IT people think of their users as "customers" and they will do anything to keep those customers happy. Also, you can read that IT is sometimes perceived as a negative in some organizations - ok, a negative in most, and IT people don't like to be the "bad guy"(again most don't but some do like the "Henchman" persona)

InfoTrends - It's All About the Solution

And it's Deja Vu all over again.

I found this excerpt from an Infotrends article in Europe.

Very interesting but not all that surprising.

— InfoTrends —

Solutions Capture More Pages and Fuel the Office Equipment Market

In years past, InfoTrends has written documents regarding the adoption rate of solutions within the office equipment market. At that time, solutions were really in the early stages of adoption, and OEM vendors and ISVs were in their initial posturing stages as they were trying to determine how best to take advantage of solutions and how they would eventually fit into their overall marketing and sales strategies. While solutions are still in the early stages of technology adoption today, we have seen significant growth in this category over the years and believe that solutions have yet to reach their full potential for penetration within this market.

Although many dealers understand that solutions should be an integral part of their strategy, most are still in the process of figuring out how to incorporate them into their range of offerings. Their propensity to fall back on the hardware products they are used to selling is hindering them from migrating to the next level and fully embracing the true solutions sale.

One of the biggest issues is sales cycles. Hardware sales cycles have traditionally been shorter than a solutions sales cycle. Another problem is that many companies set monthly quotas and sales people are usually trained to focus on hardware as they can bring the numbers in at the end of the month. In reality, a sales person would not be able to push a solution in 30 days; the cycles are getting shorter, but it still may be impossible in such a short period of time. A solution sale is like creating a good bottle of wine. It is a slower process that needs a certain amount of attention and caring before it is ready to be consumed. Nevertheless, within the office equipment market, hardware is becoming more difficult to differentiate as vendors are bringing to the market devices with equivalent functionalities and performances.

There have been some disruptions in the market with HP’s Edgeline and Xerox’s solid ink, but it seems that these technologies need more time before they gain great acceptance in the industry.

One trend is for sure: hardware is becoming more difficult to differentiate.

It is becoming more of an easily replaceable commodity or accessory, and vendors are dropping their margins at a consistent rate to remain competitive in this saturated market. Hardware revenues are expected to plummet in the next five years and, as a result, some vendors have already started to realign their sales focus from “hardware placed” to “pages captured,” from “printers” to “printing.”

Solutions and professional services have been welcomed as the Holy Grail of the office equipment market as they can be a huge differentiator in a hardware sale.

According to Clayton Christensen’s terminology, solutions can be defined as “the disrupting innovations” capable of changing the dynamics and evolution of value in the office equipment industry.

On the wave of Web 2.0, end-users are also increasingly changing the way they create, manage, and digest documents and information. Customers are sitting in the driving seat and they are inevitably looking for a tighter control over their document workflow. They require effective device utilization, reduced costs, and a single-source supplier for their equipment needs. They want to drive their entire document life-cycle and decide how to consume the originated contents and information.

As a consequence, solutions have been deemed strategic in addressing these customers’ requirements as they can help capture more pages, reduce Total Cost of Ownership, and enable a seamless and effective document management. On top of that, InfoTrends has been talking about solutions as a key driver in pulling hardware sales and professional services engagements. The popular chart below shows very clearly the European solutions crossroads, predicting that by the end of 2009, the roster of hardware only players would be cut down to 50% of the field.

The preceding is an excerpt from a report entitled Western European Network Document Solutions Forecast: 2007 - 2012. To learn more about this report, visit our online store or contact Robyn Wuori at 781-616-2100 ext. 103 or via e-mail at robyn_wuori@infotrends.com.

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European report, but the phrase remains the same - All copiers are the same, all of them, every single one.